Child Support

Today we have as a guest blogger Adam Rosenblum of the Rosenblum Law Firm. His firm handles a lot of criminal cases including traffic defense. In today’s post he explains how failure to pay your child support can lead to a suspended license. please note that Mr. Rosenblum is licensed in New Jersey so the specific laws do not apply in Texas. However, just about every state in the country (including Texas) has a statute on the books allowing for the possibility of a suspended license as a penalty for failure to pay your child support. The obvious lesson is Continue reading →

Temporary Orders are orders issued by a court during a divorce case (and sometimes in modifications) that address how things will proceed while the divorce is pending. There are many different issues that temporary orders can deal with, including but not limited to these common ones:

Use of Property – For example, who gets to stay in the residence while the divorce case is pending. Continue reading →

Here is an interesting new issue in Texas family law – what happens when a Texas citizen gets married in another state and then, while living in Texas, wants to get divorced? Oh, and one other thing, it is a same-sex marriage.

While same-sex marriage is not recognized in Texas, it is legal in several other states. At some point we will get an answer to the question because a Dallas man filed for divorce from his husband last week. They were married in Massachusetts in 2006 and have resided in Dallas ever since.

The Texas Attorney General has indicated that he will intervene in the case and seek its dismissal based on the constitutional prohibition against gay marriage.

This leaves the same-sex couple who are splitting up in a strange predicament. They probably can’t get divorced in Texas since the state does not recognize them as married. They could get divorced in Massachusetts where their marriage is recognized, but first one of them would have to meet the statutory residency requirement (one year) before filing.

I have said for years when it comes to gay marriage and divorce, why should us heterosexuals have all the fun?

This was the first time since 1995 that the amount of the cap had been raised. The increase will only impact cases were the payor makes over $100,000 per year, but my guess is that literally tens of thousands of divorce and paternity orders per year in Texas fall into this category and will now yield a higher child support amount.

Under the old guidelines a Court was limited to considering the first $6,000/ month of payor “net resources” (a statutorily defined term that is usually close to the payor’s after-tax pay). The amendment raised this cap amount to $7,500/ month.

The end result is that a court setting child support under the guidelines in a case where the payor has an annual gross income of $125,000 and one child will be setting the child support at $1,500/month. Under the old law this would have been $1,200/month.

It should be noted that the amendment did not automatically effect previous orders and applied only to cases filed on or after September 1st.

Anyone receiving child support under an existing order who was subject to the old cap may have the right to a child support increase based on this statutory change by filing a modification case. Given the large number of existing child support orders that were set based on the old cap, there are probably a huge number of cases in the state where there are very good grounds for a modification.